I'd been eagerly looking forward to the arrival of a Blu-ray Disc player at Sound & Vision since - well, ever since the rival HD DVD format launched last April. But our first round of Blu-ray movie watching ended with executive editor Rob Sabin and I walking away disappointed and confused.

If forced to list common traits of the many new flat TV-friendly speaker systems that have crossed my path of late, I'd document them as follows: slim form factor, two-grand price point (approximately), generous application of shiny metallic and gloss-black surfaces in the cabinet design. The components of the new JBL Cinema Sound speaker system fit into that mold perfectly.

Just how slim can speakers get? It's a question I find myself pondering these days as wave after wave of skinny speakers arrives on my doorstep for testing. Looking over the elegant, metal-clad CS-System 3 speakers from British newcomer Audica - a company of audio veterans who previously did time at established UK speaker outfits like Mission - the answer is: remarkably slim.

The New World (New Line; Movie •••½, Picture/Sound ••••, Extras •••), Terrence Malick's film about the fateful collision of English settlers with Native Americans in 1607, is short on dialogue and long on trippy shots of sunlight leaking through virgin forests.

Samsung has its hands in so many different TV categories - front- and rear-projection DLP TVs, flat-panel plasma and LCD sets, even old-school cathode-ray tube models - that it's hard to keep track of all the stuff they sell.

So much fuss has been made about Brokeback Mountain (Lionsgate; Movie ••••½, Picture/Sound ••••, Extras •••), especially after it was nominated for eight Oscars (winning three), that it's not worth rehashing the details here.